


you'll remember mercury

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mention of suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 16:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8215972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: Steve and Bucky don't grow up together, and only meet for the first time during the events of The Winter Soldier. This alters surprisingly little.





	

_At night, when all the colours die,  
they hide in pairs_

_and read about themselves--_  
_in colour, with their eyelids shut._

_-_ Craig Raine _, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home_

 

i.

The first thing Steve learns about the Winter Soldier, besides the fact that he’s fast, strong, and stabby, is that his eyes are a delicate shade of blue-grey.

Sea-grey, to be exact—cloud-grey, storm-tossed—and altogether more vivid and expressive than they have the right to be. It makes Steve curious about what the rest of his face looks like. It makes him rip the muzzle off. It makes him ask—baffled, because those eyes are not the eyes of a mindless murder machine—“Why are you with Hydra? What’ve they got on you?”

It makes the Soldier stare at him, equally perplexed, as if this is the first time in decades anyone has spoken to him from one human to another.

It changes everything.

 

ii.

The second thing Steve learns is that the Winter Soldier is, despite what Natasha says, a _terrible_ assassin.

This is probably a counterintuitive thought to have when he’s flat on his back on a four-hundred-ton chunk of metal plummeting into a river, bleeding out from three bullet wounds and staring Death in the face—Death, in this case, being a terrified POW with no name and no memories and a metal arm he’s currently using to bludgeon Steve’s face to a pulp. He just can’t help but think that if it was, say, Natasha he was facing—not present-day sass buddy Natasha, but Red Room era, brainwashed homicidal ballerina Natalia Romanova—he’d be dead by now. “I can help you,” says Steve over and over again, slurring, choking on the blood pooling at the back of his mouth. “I can be a friend.”

“You’re my mission,” the Soldier insists, wide-eyed, frightened, tearful, as if holding on to the mantra will make it true. Maria’s voice comes through a burst of static on the comms line, shakier than he’s ever heard it. “Steve, what are you doing? Take him down!”

But he can’t. The way he sees it, if he can’t find anything in this century—this strange, neon-lit century with its spy bureaucracies and terrorist organisations and ninety-year-old almost-lovers—to live for, he can damned well find something to die for. Compassion, maybe, for the only other person he’s found in this new world who’s like him. So he lets his shield fall, and then himself, too.

He doesn’t expect to wake again, but he does, with strange dream-visions of a metal hand reaching through murky water to pull him skywards.

Really, between this and Fury, the Winter Soldier is probably the worst assassin Steve’s ever met.

 

iii.

The third thing Steve learns about the Soldier is that all this is his, Steve’s fault, and the only reason why he’s not in jail for criminal negligence is that hardly anyone is left alive to testify against him.

That’s maybe not quite true. He’s been to enough SHIELD-sponsored PTSD seminars and support groups to understand survivor’s guilt, but it doesn’t stop him from feeling responsible. It starts with a nagging doubt at the back of his mind while he’s cuffed and chained in the back of a jolting Hydra truck, minutes away from being shot and dumped in a shallow grave, and the certainty that he’s seen the Soldier before: somewhere remote and sepia-toned, somewhere that belongs to another world entirely. He never forgets a face once he’d seen it. It’s a gift he’s always had, long before the serum gave him eidetic memory. He just can’t remember _where._

Then there’s Peggy’s bad day, and the old photographs he brings out so she can re-learn the faces of her myriad grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They’ve done this so many times, he feels like he’s seen them grow up himself. Thanks to Sharon’s obsessive scrapbooking phase, the history of the entire Carter-Jones family is documented in a series of albums, going all the way back to the war when Peggy and Gabe first met, and a picture of the 107th Regiment that’s an old favourite simply because Gabe and Dum Dum and all the other guys looked like such dweebs back then. Steve brings it out to make Peggy smile, pointing out familiar faces—“There’s Colonel Phillips in the front, see, looking like he’s gonna have an aneurysm, and there’s Gabe in the back, with Dum Dum on his left and—”

He stops. Because there _he_ is, on Gabe’s other side.

Steve reads the name in the fading caption, his heart beating a frantic battle-hymn at all his pulse points. Pvt. Jones, G. M. PFC Dugan, T. J. And then, a stranger’s name, an enemy in a sea of friends: Sgt. Barnes, J. B.

“And,” he says, softly, unable to help himself, “there’s the Winter Soldier,” and thanks his lucky stars that Peggy fell asleep several pictures ago.

After that it only takes several hours of research, an old army ledger, and a few visits to some old friends to find out what happened. Of all the people Steve would have expected to still be alive in the twenty-first century, Dum Dum Dugan isn’t one of them, but there he is, one hundred and eight years old and still going strong, if somewhat prone to bursting into song—usually country tunes from the seventies—at inopportune moments. “When I got you guys out,” Steve says (yells, really), “you told me they took one of your buddies to the lab. We were gonna go back for him.”

“Ah, yes,” Dugan says, peering at Steve mournfully from over his bushy moustache. All these years later, and he’s still got his bowler hat. “Poor old Bucky Bear. He was sick, yanno. Pneumonia.”

“Bucky Bear?”

“Fever so high it was like his eyes were gonna bulge right outta his skull,” Dugan goes on, as if he hasn’t heard. He probably hasn’t. “I’m telling him, Bucky Bear, you gotta get up and work, me and Gabe can’t hide you forever. There’s the guards, you see, disappearing people who don’t fill their quota. Was guns, I think, Tesseract-tech guns we were putting together. Unnatural things. Those bloody squid Nazis, nothing they did was ever natural. Did you hear about the time—”

They were going to go back for him, Steve thinks. They would have. But the Red Skull had pulled the self-destruct switch and set the whole facility ablaze, and they’d barely made it out through the skin of their teeth. After all that, they hadn’t thought anyone could still be alive in there.

It had been his first mission. He’d still been naive, then.

“About this, uh, Bucky Bear,” says Steve, interrupting Dugan’s spiel. “You remember his name? His actual name?”

It takes him seven more attempts to get this question across, but eventually Dugan pulls himself out of his Vietnam War reminiscing and comes back to the forties. “I don’t even remember why we called him that,” he says, frowning. It does interesting things to the loose, wrinkled skin of his forehead and jowls. “But his real name was even worse. Named after one of the presidents, I think. Not even one of the interesting ones. Most of the others just called him Sarge.”

Steve swallows hard. “Sarge,” he repeats. “Right. Got it.”

Natasha pulls up Hydra’s dossier on the Winter Soldier not long after. James Buchanan Barnes (what kind of name even is that?), DOB March 10, 1917, born in Brooklyn, brought up on Camp Lehigh in Jersey after both his parents had been killed serving in the first war. Steve must’ve missed him by a matter of days. His marks on all army standardised tests were excellent, his conduct unimpeachable. He’d been promoted to Sergeant just weeks before shipping out, upon which he’d been captured with his unit at Azzano, tortured and experimented on, and then, presumably, killed. There’s even a photo of him from back then—grinning cockily, hat jauntily askew, uniform pressed and starched to within an inch of its life.

His eyes, though. They’re scared, young eyes, eyes Steve remembers from the freeway and the helicarrier. He'd know that look anywhere.

It’s later that week that he officially hands the shield over to Sam. He’s been planning to do it for a while now, but this is just the last straw. He’s got no right to wield that shield, to wear his country’s colours, when he left that cocky boy with the frightened eyes behind.

 

iv.

The fourth thing Steve learns about Sgt. Barnes, J. B., is that he’s the weirdest fucking person he’s ever met, and considering Steve is friends with both Clint and Natasha, the competition is pretty stiff.

“Hypothetical scenario,” says Steve as he steps into Barnes’s apartment for the first time, having recovered from the booby trap on the front door involving the triangle ruler, the spool of thread, the collection of bobby pins, and the long knife. “I’m a little old lady who lives next door and decides to come over with cookies for my new neighbour. I don’t see your knife. I knock on your door. I get _stabbed through the heart at the age of ninety-five_ , leaving my twelve cats to starve and a plate of cookies I’ll never get to eat.”

Barnes has watched the whole spectacle from the kitchen counter with, predictably, his Colt rifle trained on Steve. All their interactions are falling into a certain pattern. He gives a long, slow blink. His body language is as efficient as the rest of him, and even the set of his shoulders is dense with threats. “Hypothetical scenario,” he parrots. “I’m a one-armed veteran who sees a 240-pound ex-military SHIELD mook approaching. I rig up the world’s most obvious booby trap to scare him off. He doesn’t take the hint, and breaks in anyway.”

“I was gonna ring the doorbell like a civilised person,” says Steve. “The literal Sword of Damocles was a bit of a turnoff.”

It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since the Triskelion disaster. Barnes has shaved and washed (if not combed) his hair, and changed into civvies—a black sweatshirt with a rose-red henley over that, and a ratty brown jacket over _that_. The effect is a bit like painting cartoon suns on the side of a tank, or dressing a knife up as a potato; Steve can’t decide which. Barnes smiles with just enough teeth to make it a threat, and lowers the rifle. “How’d you find me?”

 _How_ , and not _why_ , as if the latter is as obvious to him as it is to Steve. This seems inordinately significant. Steve glances around the place, a grubby one-room studio on the eleventh floor of a building with no elevator and, going by the booby-trapped front door, probably no safety standards either. The furniture is pretty basic—bed, wardrobe, desk, stove and kitchen island—but it’s the trappings of life that catch his eye. The black Moleskine tucked away by Barnes’s elbow. The bag of Hershey’s Kisses, mostly empty, on top of the fridge. The stack of books on the nightstand—Steve glimpses Carl Sagan’s _Cosmos_ and Stephen Hawking’s _A Brief History of Time_. He thinks of his own growing to-read pile, and feels a brief stab of guilt.

“Something called datamining,” he says. The initial courtesies having been exchanged, he comes further into the room and takes a seat at the kitchen counter on a rickety stool opposite his host, who makes no effort to stop him. “Every property in the country acquired by a known Hydra agent or associate in the last ten years.”

It’s not exactly right to say that Barnes frowns, because he was already frowning anyway. That’s just how his face works. It’s more that the existing lines around his eyes and mouth deepen to grooves, and his lips downturn just a little more. “There must be hundreds.”

“I must’ve gotten lucky, then,” Steve says. “This is only the eighteenth place I’ve tried.”

Taking care to make no sudden movements, he unzips his rucksack and starts pulling out strategic peace offerings. A carton of Chinese takeout. A gallon bottle of mineral water, still sealed. A container of fresh fruit he cut this morning. A tube of Oreos. A wad of cash, mostly small notes. Barnes watches without speaking, his expression growing progressively more incredulous with each item. At last he says, “Look, Cap—”

“Steve,” says Steve. He hasn’t been Cap for thirty-eight days. It’s like trying to kick a habit.

“— _Steve_ ,” says Barnes, more emphatically. He stops, as if unsure how to proceed. He’s got a way of pausing for a prolonged moment before each response, so talking to him feels less like having a conversation than playing one of those turn-based combat video games. “I should probably say that I robbed a bank last week.”

The thing about James Buchanan Barnes is that you never see him coming, whether he’s landing on the roof of your new friend’s car or dragging the dinner table conversation through a hairpin turn. Steve manages to keep his expression bland, but just barely. “O… kay?”

Barnes bobs his head in assent. “Back in D.C. It wasn’t a real bank, just a front for a Hydra depot. They kept mission supplies there. Among—among other things.” The look on his face is dark enough to discourage all follow-up questions. “Point is, I raided the cash. I’m also balls deep in eighteen different bank accounts whose owners won’t be needing them any more. Donated most of it, but I’m still disgustingly rich. So you don’t need to feel like you have to”—he waves a hand at the stuff—“slip crumbs to me under the table or anything.”

It’s more words than Steve has ever heard him say in one go before. What’s funny is how, even though the accusation feels like being kicked in the gut, Steve totally understands the sentiment. There’s a part of him, the part that’s still the scrawny, wheezy kid whose hackles went up at the slightest mention of charity, that’s nodding along in commiseration. He considers his options, and chooses his next words with care. “Right,” he says. “Of course. So you won’t mind if I pinch one of these.”

He rips open the tube of Oreos and takes one. Barnes continues to stare, boggled. Then, slowly, like watching a time-lapse video, his expression morphes into what might be a distant relative of the one Sam had worn when he’d said, _Oh, so that’s how it is?_ Deliberate to the point of belligerence, he takes three Oreos, crams them into his mouth, and begins to chew, all without breaking eye contact with Steve.

Steve realises, then, what’s been nagging at the edges of his consciousness for the last few minutes. Last night he spent three full hours YouTubing videos of baby great white sharks, because they’re cute in a toothy, stabby kind of way, and he’s thinking about putting them on a mural on his bathroom wall now that he’s got so much free time on his hands. Fact is, Barnes really, really reminds him of a baby great white.

He’s not sure what to do with this information.

Barnes polishes off his mouthful of cookies. He picks up a few stray crumbs from the tablecloth with his thumb and forefinger, and swallows those as well. It’s his left hand he’s using, which means his metal arm has even more sensitivity and dexterity than Steve previously thought. Then he unscrews the cap of the water bottle and washes it all down with a long swallow. The muscles in his throat move. Steve realises he’s lost the thread of his thought, and scrabbles desperately to get it back. “What’ve you been doing since,” he says, “you know?”

Barnes sets the bottle down. His eyes glint. “The usual.”

“Murdering?” Steve suggests. “Beating people’s faces in while weeping?”

To Barnes’s credit, he doesn’t even blanch. He looks at Steve for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether he should give a flippant answer or a real one. This, too, is a struggle Steve understands. “I’ve been doing some research,” he says at last. “On myself.”

“Yeah? What’d you find?”

Barnes knows how to stall when he puts his mind to it. He peels apart another Oreo, studies its two halves, and lays them out before him with surgeon-like precision. He opens the container of fresh fruit, picks up the chopsticks that came with the Chinese takeout, and—after a few moments of scowling contemplation—selects a peach slice and places it on the creamy half of the Oreo. Still wielding the chopsticks like a pincer claw, he reassembles the cookie, now bulging with peach, and takes a dainty bite out of it.

Case in point: weirdest fucking person.

“I went back to Camp Lehigh,” he says after a moment. “Or what’s left of it, anyway, after you blew it up.”

“That was your lot, not mine,” Steve protests, but he feels bad anyway. That’s like if SHIELD decided to blow up the avenue on Brooklyn where he’d grown up and become closely acquainted with a number of dumpsters. The world has moved on, and it’s not like he can ever go home again, but it’s still comforting to know it’s there.

Barnes ignores him. “Anyway,” he goes on, “just going back there triggered some memories, I think. Got from there to the orphanage I was in before. Then to my ma’s grave. Like some morbid treasure hunt.”

Steve is quiet, thinking about his own mother and _her_ grave, and how long it’s been since he’s gone. “I think we had some mutual friends back in the war,” he says. “One of them said you were called, uh, Bucky Bear?”

Barnes stares at him for the longest moment, as if daring him to laugh. To Steve’s horror, his face does its damndest to smile. He forces it to straighten out. He can’t laugh at a guy’s name when it’s all he’s got, for fuck’s sake. “You were taken in Azzano, weren’t you?” he asks. “By the Red Skull and a scientist called Zola?”

Barnes flinches at the name. It’s a movement so imperceptible Steve would have missed it if he hadn’t been expecting it, and after that he looks angry with himself. “Why?” Barnes asks. His eyes are wary.

Because it would be dishonesty bordering on cowardice not to answer, Steve says, “I was there.”

Barnes shivers. The skin of his flesh wrist is goosebumped. “Is that why you’re here?”

“It’s not the only reason,” says Steve, “and you know it.”

They look at each other across the table, with its cargo of cookies and fruits and notebook and rifle. In the daylight slanting in through the window, Barnes’s blue-grey eyes are pale and lucent, a cool colour, but not cold. Steve thinks of soft things, of smoke-furred kittens and oversized sweaters, old newsprint and coffee rings on sketchbook paper. Finally Barnes finishes his cookie and reaches for the takeout box to start on that next. “The way I see it,” he says, “it doesn’t really matter who I was before. Whoever that poor shmuck from the forties was, he’s dead now, and the world’s gotta deal with me instead.”

He smiles. A hard smile, a shark smile. A thin wisp of steam rises from the noodles, but his skin is still goosebumped. Steve looks around again. The apartment looks like the sort of place that gets drafty at night, and that brown jacket doesn’t look terribly warm. Barnes might have money, but he can’t exactly go into a department store when he’s a wanted fugitive.

Steve steals a wonton, and arrives at a tactical decision. “Great,” he says. “I gotta go in five. Mind if I use your washroom?”

Mouth full, Barnes makes a noncommittal noise and waves a careless hand at the narrow doorway beside the kitchen sink. Steve shrugs out of his own leather jacket, leaving it on the chair, and goes to wash his hands. Score.

#

His phone beeps twice on the way home. He pulls up outside his block, kills his bike engine, and checks his texts. He has two from an unknown number: _u left ur jacket_ , and, _i know u meant to._

Steve has picked up too many tricks from Natasha to wonder how Barnes got his number. He decides to ignore the second text. _Whoops_ , he types. _Look after it for me?_ And then, _Btw, meant to ask what you want to be called._

Barnes is a long time replying. Steve showers and changes and fixes himself a bowl of yesterday’s curry to eat in front of the TV. He’s almost gotten through a full episode of _Chopped_ by the time his phone vibrates again, and he snatches it up with maybe more haste than necessary. _bucky bear will do just fine._

He knows Barnes is being sarcastic, but all the same he shoots back a _Will do! :)_ and saves the number to his contacts.

 

v.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh things Steve learns about Bucky Barnes is that he’s a space nerd, enjoys texting, and is a little shit.

“I’m sorry,” his date says, breaking off her story mid-sentence to look at him with the kind of concern that usually masks irritation. She’s one of Natasha’s finds, an art historian called Ashley or Ashleigh or something; dear God, they’re all called Ashleigh, except when they’re called Brad. “Do you need to go save the world or something?”

“Uh, no,” says Steve, feeling inordinately guilty even though he _has_ been listening to every word she says. “I don’t really do that any more.”

“It’s just,” she says, “you’ve received nineteen texts in the last ninety seconds from Bucky Bear, whale emoji.”

“Shark emoji,” he corrects. “They didn’t have a proper shark one.”

He’ll probably never see her again.

He checks his phone after he drops her off at her place. He has a full screen of texts, all of them from Bucky. _did u kno gravity bends light_ , says one. _mass is just frozen energy,_ says another. _hey, question time, says a third. if im on a boat going at 30mph and there’s a contrary wind of 20mph, and i shine a flashlight straight into the wind. how fast does the light travel?_

Part of Steve’s mind, the part that still automatically calculates angles and trajectories for his shield whenever he walks into a room, is already trying to work this out. The rest of him is puzzling at the greater riddle that is Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, who has apparently decided to take up residence in Steve’s inbox and spam him with science facts. Before he can solve either problem, his phone vibrates again, and a couple of new messages come in. _do you mind if i text u sometimes_ , Bucky says, maybe a little belatedly. _im trying to do this person thing properly._

There is a strange soreness in Steve’s chest, something that feels a bit like grief but is softer than that. _Trick question_ , he replies. _Light travels at the speed of light._ He hesitates, and then adds, _You can text me anytime._

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Edwin Morgan's _The First Men on Mercury_.
> 
> I actually made fake text screenshots to go along with this fic but they didn't fit, so [here they are](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com/post/151512245943/i-made-these-to-go-with-youll-remember-mercury)!
> 
> I'm [dirtybinary on tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) and I have a couple of original novels out if you're interested--info [here](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] you'll remember mercury](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9115423) by [dirtybinary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary), [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)




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